Describes 3 experiments with a total of 277 male undergraduates. All Ss were pretested on the Revised Mehrabian Achievement Scale for males. Exp. I demonstrated that Ss who differ in achievement level also differ in their manner of accounting for the causes of their outcome at a digit-guessing task. High achievers more frequently attributed their successes or failures to the degree of effort expended than did either intermediate or low achievers, while intermediate achievers ascribed outcomes to luck more often than either of the extreme achievement groups. In Exp. II and III, the attributions typical of high and low achievers were induced in 2 experimental groups, with the prediction that these groups would diverge behaviorally in the same way as uninstructed high and low achievers. In both digit-guessing and anagram tasks, high-achieving Ss performed as predicted, while low-achieving Ss failed to be differentially affected by the 2 instructions. Possible explanations for this pattern of results are discussed. (16 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)